by Joel Frapart

The idea for Children of the Night first came to me in college when I was taking a class called “The History of Anti-Semitism”. I took this class because, as a Jew, I truly felt like I hadn’t suffered enough in my short life, and thus wanted to learn more about how my ancestors had suffered so that I could do some suffering by proxy. It’s a Jewish tradition.

The teacher of this class, an older Jewish woman who clearly had some very passionate feelings about this topic, once mentioned an old myth about Jews. She told us about Blood Libel tales and their harms. Accusations of unseen ritual murders were a common way to marginalize insular groups in medieval Europe. These accusations were hard to defend against. Often, they were a pretext for disenfranchisement or seizing the group’s resources. In some stories, Jews were believed to steal newborn Christian babies so that they could, you guessed it, drink their blood.

At this time in my life, I was also an avid watcher of the Francis Ford Copolla film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In that cinematic version, Dracula himself (as portrayed by Gary Oldman) feeds a baby to his three demonic wives. When I learned about this myth, it caused me to instantly make the following connection in my mind:

“Holy shit! Vampires are based on Jews!” This lead me down a trail of thought that went from wanting to write a play about Jewish vampires to a dark comedy that’s a cross between Dracula and Fiddler on the Roof. In my plan, an ancient vampire is desperately trying to marry off his three daughters. After this idea formed in my head, I took it and did what I always do with my ideas; I put it into a very long word document. Then I proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it, at least for the time being. I still have that word document and it keeps growing!

Several year later…

I met and began writing with George Morris. After we finished writing our 2nd full-length play together, we were tossing around ideas for what to write next. There were a lot of possibilities for our third play. As a bit of an exercise, I decided to pull a few ideas out of the aforementioned word document, throw them haphazardly at George, and see if any of them stuck. This idea stuck. I don’t remember which of us came up with the name: Children of the Night.

George added some of his own ideas to it (mostly bad puns, a love of the Outer Banks, and an exploration of different vampire lineages inspired by the Anita Blake novels). After a few false starts, the completed show began to take form. As of today, we are looking forward to its first revival on stage. I can say that Children of the Night is probably the play that I am most proud of. The fact that it has been produced, and received as much praise as it has, really makes all that suffering by proxy I did for my ancestors seem worth it.